Court adjourned, Witness Applejack dismissed

With Chapter 17, 'The Witless' is officially over. I have to say, this story was to date my most difficult but also my most fun to make, that even necessitated bringing in a second editor to properly deliver the quality I was hoping to bring. Long story short, writing it was a blast and a great learning experience, and even if it won't reach any top-ranks, I'm satisfied with all that we have done and I'm happy the story is finally finished.

If you haven't read the story yet, but are interested, now is the perfect time. I know some avoid unfinished stories like the plague, but I'm happy to say this isn't one.

I'd like to thank my editors again for all the time they spent refining this story, with hundreds of comments ranging from commas to rephrasing entire sentences, the story wouldn't be half this good without them!

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I'd rather not reiterate the points made in the introductory blogpost, instead here are some random thoughts that I've had during/after the writing:

It's really surprising how effective it is to just start the story in the middle, if you have the outline in mind. Luckily I saved the very first draft of the story and it begins like this:

Applejack couldn't believe her eyes. In front of her, served on a literal silver platter, sat a gorgeous, ripe, red apple. Its polished surface gleamed from the light of the chandelier above and practically begged somepony, anypony to take a bite. While her mouth swallowed the drool that gathered from the sight, she looked away abashedly.

This scene (albeit slightly modified) appears only in chapter five and yet it was the first thing I put to paper and what convinced me that not only could this concept work, it could work well. Obviously I've had the quite massive help of being able to peek the original if I needed some inspiration, but it's still a good idea in my opinion to try to convince yourself that the idea is solid and then build upon that confidence.

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I really quite regret not casting Blind Devotion as Tree Hugger. The moment it was pointed out to me in the comments, it struck me like lightning how well the two would have meshed. I still think she ended up serving her (very minor) role as needed, but it's definitely a missed opportunity.

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I can only wonder how many rewrites more professional authors make... Chapter 11, 14, and 17 each saw huge expansions and large swathes of their content rewritten. I am very satisfied with 14 in particular. In the original 'The Witness', it's serves as a fairly lighthearted, comedic scene to give a breather between the revelation of just how much danger the protagonist is in and the trial itself.

Here I rather opted use it to expand upon Pinkie's character. Comrade Virág was an intentionally ambiguous figure, both out of reasons of censorship and to give him a certain mildly threatening aura, but since Pinkie is a far more explosive pony, I wanted to show her true colors in a hopefully not too heavy-handed way.

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Getting Applejack's voice down was surprisingly hard. I think what ended up in the fic is ultimately decent, but only because I got a lot of help from my editors, who diligently pointed out when her manner of speech was not fitting her well (or the many-many times I forgot to mark her accent with apostrophes.)

One thing in particular I was surprised by is how much I associated the verbal quirks that are far more relevant to Apple Bloom with AJ. I naturally wrote "Ah'm"-s instead of "I'm"-s for example. Wrangling that into proper shape was a pain.

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Finally, while I would have liked a little more engagement (mostly because the original work really deserves the attention), I'm still very happy to see that I was able to consistently keep around 65 people hooked. I really appreciate your time and continued attention, and I hope overall it was a good experience worth coming back to weekly.

Thank you!